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The building you see in the picture is the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama. It was completed in 1851, after the previous capitol building burned in 1849. When the southern states seceded from the Union in 1861 this city served as provisional seat of the Confederacy for three months, until the government was moved to Richmond, Virginia. It was in the Senate chamber of this building that Jefferson Davis was elected to be president of the Confederate States of America and the constitution of the C.S.A. was adopted. On the top step of this west portico of the capitol building Davis was sworn in as president in February, 1861. I stood on the gold star marking the spot where he stood.

A little over a century later the famous civil rights march led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from Selma to Montgomery ended on these very same steps, on March 25, 1965.

The building represents a significant monument in American history and is one of the few state capitol buildings to be designated a National Historic Landmark.

The day I visited Montgomery the region was suffering under the coldest weather it had experienced in over ten years. The temperature as I took this picture early in the morning of December 30 was 17 degrees Fahrenheit (-8.3 desgrees Celsius). I was shivering so hard I could barely hold the camera still!

This is Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, just a block down the hill from the state capitol building. Martin Luther King, Jr., served as pastor here from 1954 to 1960. It was in this building in 1955 that the local leaders of the desegregation movement met to discuss the persecution that African-Americans were experiencing on the city buses. A bus boycott was planned as a form of peaceful protest. Inside the church there is a great mural depicting scenes from Dr. King's life in leading peaceful protest against racial oppression. I was unable to get into the building the morning I was here, as a funeral was about to begin. This is still a very active church.

This building is the brand-new Rosa Parks Museum, which celebrated its grand opening on December 1, 2000, the 45th anniversary of the evening when Rosa Parks decided not to stand up and give her seat on the bus to a white person. The bus driver shouted at her, "Give up your seat!"

She quietly, tiredly said, "No."

He screamed at her, "I'll have you arrested!"

She calmly answered, "You may do that." And she sat in her seat on that crowded bus until the police came to take her to jail. She hadn't intended to start any huge political movement; it was just that she was sick and tired of the way blacks were treated on the Montgomery buses in those days. But her decision that chilly evening served as the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott that eventually brought national attention to the problem of segregation and led to Supreme Court decisions guaranteeing equal rights for all citizens of our country.

The museum stands on the corner where the old Empire Theater was situated, outside of which the bus was stopped while the driver and passengers waited for the police to arrest Mrs. Parks. The Empire fell into disrepair and was torn down years ago. Now this bright new building stands on its site. Inside the museum are dramatic multi-media productions which tell the story of the incident that evening in 1955 as well as the story of how the black community banded together to get everyone to their jobs during the long thirteen months that the bus boycott lasted. Many in the community walked to their jobs, and statistics in the shoe repair business from those thirteen months show a huge increase in revenues! In the end, segregation was declared unconstitutional, and after that blacks could sit anywhere on the bus they liked---and also drink out of any drinking fountain and eat in any restaurant and sit in any movie theater and play in any park and stay in any motel that they liked.

My personal guide for the tour through the museum was the Vice President for Administration and Financial Affairs at Troy State University in Montgomery (which owns the land and built the museum). I was the only person who bought a ticket right at 9:00 that morning, so I had a personal tour through the films and presentations, instead of going through with a group. Mr. White told me many interesting stories about the acquisition of the papers and articles that are on display. He also told me about Mrs. Parks' coming to Montgomery from her home in Michigan for the grand opening of this museum on December 1. She is quite elderly now and saw the museum from her wheel chair. As she watched the videotape of when she was recognized during President Clinton's State of the Union address, she waved at herself on the TV monitor in the museum. The President said that night as he addressed the joint session of Congress, "Rosa Parks is here with us tonight, and she may stand or sit as she likes." In the second picture, the statue depicts her sitting--on the bus that night so long ago.

This plaza in Montgomery, just a block from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and two blocks from the capitol building, is the Civil Rights Memorial. It was built to honor those who died in the struggle for equality. The round black granite table has carved in its top the names of those who gave their lives. The first entry is dated 1954, and nearly all the way around the circle is the last entry, the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Between those two entries there is a space in the circle to represent all who died before 1954 or after 1968 and also to represent those whose names weren't known when the monument was created.

Water continuously flows up out of the table's center and across the names of the martyrs, which radiate out from the center like hands on a clock. On the black granite wall behind the table is Dr. King's paraphrase of Amos 5:24--"until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." On hot days the water flowing down the back wall and across the table provides a refreshing coolness, and the sound of it trickling and splashing contributes to the tranquil, soothing character of the place. The day I visited the memorial, however, the outside temperature was 17 degrees Fahrenheit (-8.3 desgrees Celsius). Amazingly, the water continued to flow, but where it splashed on the floor of the monument below the table it had turned to ice. I couldn't allow myself much time for contemplation, no matter how moving the site is, for I was shivering wildly in the cold.

The designer of this memorial is Maya Lin, who also created the design for the Vietnam Veterans Wall in Washington, D.C.

This house in Montgomery, Alabama, was rented by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in October, 1931, for a period of several months. Their daughter, Frances Scott, was nine years old at the time; they called her "Scottie." Zelda had grown up in Montgomery, and the family had come back to her hometown to be near her parents. During the time the Fitzgeralds were living in this house Scott was working on his fourth novel Tender Is the Night. He was already famous for his previous book, The Great Gatsby. The Fitzgeralds had lived in Europe for a time after The Great Gatsby was published to such wide acclaim, but while there, Zelda had suffered a mental breakdown. Hence, they had come to Montgomery to find a quieter life. While living in this house, Zelda had another mental collapse and was hospitalized in Baltimore. Scott and Scottie finished out the lease on this house until April of 1932 and then moved to Baltimore to be near Zelda.

This is the only museum in the world dedicated to the lives of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and it contains many personal items of the two, as well as memorabilia from Scottie's life. Scottie returned to Montgomery many times during her life to spend time with family and friends, and during those visits she developed a friendship with Starr Smith, a former NBC radio reporter who had made Montgomery his home. He happened to be in the museum the day I was visiting. His voice sounded ever so familiar to me when I heard him talking in our tour group about his book; the mystery was solved when I asked him about it and he identified himself. We had quite a good conversation about writing when the tour was finished. He showed me the museum's copy of the book he'd been talking about, which contains a piece about the Fitzgeralds and about Scottie in particular. He wouldn't allow me to order a copy from the museum; he's inscribing and sending me a copy--but I have to pay for it when it arrives! It was a great honor to meet him and get to talk to him awhile about writing.

Scottie died of cancer just a few years ago, when she was in her 60s. There are pictures in the museum of her family visiting this house; her daughters are women my age. Somehow, that puts the whole story of the Fitzgeralds in perspective for me. Scott and Zelda were such a dramatic pair--and their lives were so spectacular--that they had seemed ageless and timeless to me. Their lives had been so short; Scott died of a heart attack at the age of 40, and Zelda died in a fire when she was 48.

This picture was taken right at the end of the bridge across the Alabama River, and about this time my camera started acting up. Right after I took this picture I turned around to take a picture of the bridge itself, and later when I loaded the picture into my computer I saw that there was hardly anything visible in that scene. I didn't notice it until I was 150 miles down the road that night, so it was impossible to go back and get another shot.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge takes Highway 80 out of Selma and across the Alabama River, on the way to the capital city of Montgomery, 50 miles (80 Kilometers) east. I read all about the significance of this bridge and saw the video clips about it from the television news of the 60s in the Martin Luther King, Jr., Museum in Atlanta many weeks ago. If my memory serves me correctly, it happened like this:

During the first civil rights march in Selma, Martin Luther King, Jr., led marchers out of Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma and onto the bridge. They had the necessary permits for their march, and they remained peaceful. They were told by law enforcement officers to stop. They peacefully kept walking up and over the crescent of the sloped bridge. As they came off the bridge, right at this point where I took this picture, they were attacked by the law enforcement officers, and several of the marchers were beaten severely. A few months later, again having the necessary permits, they marched out of Selma and on to Montgomery, camping out two nights on friendly farms along the way, ending on the state capitol steps in Montgomery on March 25, 1965.

I would hope that you would e-mail me if you have additions or corrections to this report.

I felt a shudder pass through me as I stood on this spot. I gave great thanks to those who continued in the struggle for their civil rights and to those who gave their lives in the cause. Every year a part of the march is reenacted, and that is what the small red sign is about. This coming March, people will again walk across that bridge to help us all remember what was accomplished in those years and also to realize that there is more to do in the cause of ensuring justice for all.

You can see how cold it was in Mobile, Alabama, the day I was there--January 3. The low temperature nearly set a record. The fountain kept spraying water, but where the water landed on this statue of The Fishmonger it froze. The sign in front of the pool states:

"This block of the Spanish Plaza is dedicated to the city of Málaga, Spain, sister city to Mobile. March 21 has been set aside by the city of Mobile as Málaga Day, and the same day has been designated as Mobile Day by the city of Málaga. The statue is "The Fishmonger." In Spanish it's "El Cenachero." It literally means "The Basket-carrier." It's the official symbol of the City of Málaga. This statue, a gift from Mobile's sister city, is a replica of the original, which stands in Mobile Park in Málaga. The artist is Jaime Pimentel, sculptor of Málaga."

U.S.S. Alabama Battleship Memorial Park, along Mobile Bay outside Mobile, Alabama, is a 155-acre (62.7-hectare) park dedicated to veterans of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Operation Desert Storm. Focal point of the park is this battleship which served in the Pacific during World War II. Most of its nine battle stars were earned in the Pacific during that time. At the end of the war, the Alabama played a dominant role in the occupation of the Yokosuka-Tokyo area. The ship was decommissioned in 1947 and moved to Mobile Bay, where it now serves as a museum through which visitors can freely walk to explore the decks, turrets, mess, berth compartments, bridge, wardroom, and captain's cabin. For two reasons, I didn't visit it this day: I had seen it in great detail with my son when he was twelve years old, and the temperature outside was hovering around 25 degrees F (-4 degrees C) when I shot this picture. I didn't figure the inside of the ship would be much warmer.

Just out of sight behind the battleship is the submarine U.S.S. Drum, which is also open for visitors to explore, and which I'd also seen in great detail that summer long ago.